PHOTOGRAPHERS SPEAK

Dean Brierly interviews the men and women who are shaping the parameters of photography — from old school to new generation, traditional to cutting edge.

Monday, May 9, 2016

Machiel Botman: Gazing WithinMinor White once said, “All photographs are
self-portraits.” When one considers the medium from a fine art rather than
utilitarian perspective, it’s hard to argue against this assertion. Despite its
mechanical nature, photography not only reveals what’s in front of the camera,
it inescapably alludes to the personalities of those behind it. At one extreme
are photographers who make self-reflective imagery in a calculated and direct
manner, using themselves as subject (Francesca Woodman is a famous example). In
contrast are photographers who reveal themselves more obliquely (as White did),
through choice of subject matter, visual style and use of symbolism. Prominent
among the latter category is Dutch photographer Machiel Botman, whose entire
body of work, begun in the late 1970s, can be seen as an uninterrupted visual
diary of self-exploration. Yet he’s no soul-baring exhibitionist; Botman is
akin to writers who express more between the lines than in the lines
themselves. And his autobiographical impulse is subordinate to his desire
simply to make sense of his life and the lives of those around him. It’s an
unhurried, unstressed process for Botman, who was born in Vogelenzang, the
Netherlands, in 1955.

Machiel Botman, self-portrait

What sparked your interest in photography?

To be honest, I don't know. Cameras and using
them were part of life for as long as I can remember. We (my brother and I)
grew up in a forest, and there were many things around us worth photographing:
tree huts, dogs, cats, birds, friends, each other—and all the tools a child
uses. The cameras came into the house because our father (who did not live with
us) brought cameras that people turned in to his insurance company. So we could
try them out. Some worked, others not.

When did you realize this was the medium you
wanted to devote yourself to?

Perhaps around the age of 22, 23, when I
photographed my girlfriend, Jel. Then, because I photographed someone I loved,
I simply loved photography too. I began to develop film and print the
negatives. I think it was the total quiet in that darkroom, for days and weeks
nonstop, that won me over.

White Cat, 1965

The photo “White Cat,” taken in 1965, is pretty
accomplished for a 10-year-old: the composition is nicely balanced, it shows
good timing in capturing the cat’s graceful pose, and it has nice contrast and
textures. Is this image representative of your early work?

No, in the sense of photographic quality, this
is an exceptional image and it was simply being lucky. Apart from what you say,
it is how that little plastic lens of the Kodak Instamatic dealt with the white
cat in the snow. Total magic and it reminds me of early Japanese photography,
not very sharp, not very subtle in the grays, but with such feeling to it all.
There are many more childhood photographs and some are beautiful, but this image
of the cat says it all for me.

Even at this early stage, you managed to evoke a
very personal response to your subject matter. Was this a conscious approach,
or did it evolve naturally?

It came in a natural way, but it is not easy to put into
words what that means. What may be personal to me can be something else to you.
I think it is about many things, from just thinking about photography, to how
one photographs, even in terms of the equipment, to how one develops and
prints. In the beginning I thought more about
photography than I did later on. Like: Should I use a telephoto lens for a
portrait? Answer: no, because I want to be very close to the person I
photograph; otherwise it has no meaning. True, you can make beautiful portraits
with telephoto lenses, but when you remain far [away] from the person, you have
no contact and there is no reason for the photograph, except perhaps an
aesthetic reason. And that's not enough, it never is. Of course, this is all
subjective blah blah, but it is my way: A small camera and one lens is really
what I use 95% of the time. (Olympus OM1 with a 40mm and a Pentax LX with a
50mm). I like small cameras because they do not intimidate. It means I can get
much closer to what really matters, the personal worlds within photography.

Ijke's Hand, 1999

Another side of the answer is the subject choice itself. I
only work with people who mean something to me, often in a strong way. So there
are no models and I do not ask people to pose. They know I photograph them, but
it doesn't matter. It is almost unimportant, I'm playing. Maybe that sounds
crazy, but that's how it is. And even with objects or landscapes the better
images come from playing rather than thinking things out. All I do is get
close. I identify with something Robert Frank once said when asked about using
family [members] in his images: “That's the soup I cook."

How long did it take you to develop a personal
vision?

Not so long and very long. Some great images happened right
away. But to understand it all, and mostly myself, that took a long time, and
still does. At first people in the field asked me: "Beautiful image, but
what is it about?" I had no answer, at least not an honest one. The real
reason for people to ask that question was that my context wasn't yet clear. Some
great images jumped out, but there were no other images making clear where it
all came from and where I was going to. That part has only slowly changed. I
just took my time, I worked for years on the same books. I made many book
dummies to show myself things. Probably this made me realize things about
photographing.

Tree House, 2008

What was the biggest challenge in doing so?

To just stick to what I believed in. Mine is intuitive
photography. In my case that means to be a snail.

Is there a specific Dutch photographic tradition
or movement that helped shape your creative perspective?

I'm not sure there is, but I do feel that Holland is very
lucky to have (had) some photographers: In particular Johan van der Keuken and
Gerard Fieret. Two opposites. Johan succeeded in making connections between
very personal worlds and larger worlds: political, etc. Beautiful thinker.
Fieret was the opposite: all intuition. Mostly images of girls and women he
liked. Beautiful stuff, raw, modest and without a single pretense.

People take photographs for all sorts of
reasons. Your bio states that for you, it’s a way to understand life. Can you
specify how the process works for you?

The understanding of life comes after the images are taken,
when they have come to rest. Many times to take a photograph is a violent
action—you slice an instant from its past and future. To let that become
meaningful you need time. To understand what you are really looking at. To
understand how that image can become important within who you are. Maybe it
connects to what you have done before. Maybe it shows you something you never
realized.

Shoulder, Magda, 2008

Is all of your work autobiographical? Is it
important to know the people that you photograph?

Yes almost all of it. From early on I had the rather
fatalistic idea that if I couldn't do it with those who mattered to me, then I
couldn't do it at all. Well, I am still in the first stage, trying to do it
with those who matter to me. It is about my idea of what is real or not. All
very subjective, but I am still quite convinced. For instance, it is not so
difficult for a photographer to do a portrait of someone which suggests there
is something highly personal between them. To many photographers that is their
idea of a great portrait. But to me, if there is not that something highly
personal between them, that is a lie. I have to say this is just about me. If I
would take a photograph of a person that suggests we have a lot going on
between us, then this image would always bother me if that was not true.

What kind of exploration does photography
represent for you? Spiritual, intellectual, social?

Not intellectual. Spiritual is a big word. But I have learned
tremendously from this profession. I have found things in my images that I
never knew were there when I took them. I have understood things by putting
certain images together, by sequencing them. It's always about things between
the lines, or things that are difficult to give a name. I guess that could mean
spiritual. Catherine Duncan (a friend and writer for Paul Strand) once looked
at my work, she was over 90 years old and said: “Well now, of course we are not
going to be spoon-fed.” And then, with a wicked smile in her eyes, said,
"But then, how could we if we want to enter anything remotely
spiritual."
I am not a social photographer, but I have learned a lot from social
photographers. Philip Jones Griffiths' book Vietnam Inc. was a
revelation to me. The images of course, but also how he put it together. It was
one of my first photo books. Years later, when the whole world had turned
plastic and uncaring, he made Agent Orange. He had never let go of
Vietnam and what happened there. And again he made a special book. But not many
people wanted to see pictures of unborn, mis-formed children in bottles.

Lea, 2002

Do you have an overall conception in mind when
you go out to photograph, or is it more of a searching process?

The latter. I am the photographer without a plan. I just
react.

Put another way, do you look for images, or do
they look for you?

They find me, for sure.

Do you feel that the further you get from a
literal interpretation of a particular subject, the closer you get to revealing
or capturing some kind of truth about it, whether literal or symbolic?

Yes. I think precise information or linear information often
takes us further from that truth. Sometimes it becomes so terribly difficult to
imagine anything today. And it is in our imagination that we can reveal
something, or find a certain truth.

Ijke Flowers, 1993

For me, the images are all about dualities. They
are strange yet familiar, inviting yet distant, transparent yet oblique. Do
they strike you in this manner?

Yes, for some reason they are never very singular. Some have
really confused me, because I slowly began to see things that were conflicting
with what I had seen before. There is the image “IJke Flowers” from 1993. I use
it on the cover of my book Heartbeat. The instant of photographing
my five-year old son IJke with the flowers lasted just seconds. There was no
plan, it just happened like a short silence in a storm. When I saw it I knew it
was the cover image I had wanted to find for more than two years. That book I
began after my mother had passed away, and in a sense it is about that too. But
it is also about my boy, who was born not long before, about my relationships,
my people. At first that image is a young boy holding out white flowers to the
photographer, to you. However, because of the light and the absence of focus in
the majority of the image, something ghostly enters. Something like death.
Something not very easy.

We should talk again in a few years, when I have had (and you
too) some time with the image of “Horse and Church,” from the book One
Tree. I know it has many layers to it, but I can't yet put it into words.
It is basically a mistake; my camera was not fully transporting the film. And I
kind of willingly refused to deal with it. But after that it is only about the
image we see. A sleeping horse? I am not sure.

Horse and Church, 2008

What I ultimately take away from your work is a
profound sense of innocence. You seem to evoke a kind of primeval emotional
state.

I think I never grew up. I simply do not accept many grownup
reasonings, and I do accept very much the unfinished child. Him or her I can
relate with, without any problem.

Do you consider yourself a romantic?

No, to the contrary.

Do you feel that photo books are the best way to
disseminate your work?

Yes, but not only. Simply, a table can be great too. Let's
say shows are smaller moments in time; they have an end to them when we take
the pictures of the wall. Therefore the afterlife of a show is relatively
short. It’s so different with a book. We keep coming back to it, so the ideas
in a book meet a changing person. Or, the viewer can change how the book
affects him or her. In exhibitions there is something terribly distant about
standing in front of a framed image. To hold a book in your hands feels more
like real life to me. It is a strange medium, the photo book. To me, it gets
most interesting when the books have nothing explanatory and when it is the
object you hold in your hands that somehow gives away its identity. You know,
like when you first pick up a new book and leaf through it from the back to the
front. And you simply know you are going to love this book. Now that is very
photo book! It’s difficult to pick up a novel and do some fragmented reading
from back to front . . . well, for me it is.

Elswout, Haarlem, 1999

How important is the darkroom to expressing your
particular vision? It looks as if much of the darkness in the images is
enhanced during printing.

I know my prints have a lot of contrast, but to me that is
normal. I like a beautiful print, but I don’t have to get the total nuances the
medium can give me. That is not my holy goal. I want secrets, emptiness,
mistakes and all the stuff that makes life so interesting.

I like how you open up unusual visual
perspectives through sequential imagery.

I find photography beautiful when it shows small steps in
life. When I photograph someone it is always quite quickly. I don't like to put
through through endlessly being stared at though a camera before taking the
picture. It means it is over before we know it. But then, when the camera is
just in my hands and not in front of my eyes, I always shoot some more. Many
times that's when things really happen and when the person becomes alive. Then it
is often nice to show two or three images in sequence.

What are the most important qualities a creative
photographer must possess?

I think it is all about imagination. I don't know if having a
certain kind of imagination is a quality. But I like it best when a
photographer's imagination surprises me, when it really works. Then I see an
identity of the one who made the piece. We are at a strange point in
photography: Digital printing is taking over. So many photographers let labs
print their images. Of course, they give directions for the printing, but it is
not the same as when one always does his or her own prints. That brings you
much closer to the photographer also having an identity in the printing. That's
about touching stuff, struggling, being a human being. We are losing that, and
that means we are also losing the knowledge. Scary stuff. All of this to say
that I prefer a photographer to make his or her prints, to see the specific
quality in that.

Julia, 2007

(All images copyright
Machiel Botman.He is represented by the Gitterman Gallery in New
York and the Mica Gallery in Milan. His books include Heartbeat (Volute,
1994),Rainchild (Schaden and Le Point du Jour, 2004) and One
Tree (Nazraeli Press, 2011). His work is included in numerous
institutional collections, including the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the
Tokyo Museum of Photography and the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. To see more of his imagery, visit www.machielbotman.com.)

Friday, September 7, 2012

Bob Peterson: Old School ProThere is a fundamental directness and
decency about Bob Peterson, qualities that are visibly manifest in a celebrated
photographic career that encompasses sports, photojournalism and advertising.
He began taking pictures at 12 when his father built him a darkroom in their
Berkeley, California home. It was there that Peterson “saw my first little
deckled-edge contact print floating in the developer tray turn from white to a
real picture. That was magic, and I was hooked.” Encouraged by his mother,
Peterson rapidly progressed, winning an Eastman Kodak photo contest while in
high school. At 15, he was shooting sports for the Berkeley Daily Gazette. While still in his teens, he freelanced for
Time and Sports Illustrated. At 19, as a stringer for UPI, he covered
Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy when they campaigned in Seattle during the
1960 presidential election. Although sports photography was his first love, his
priorities changed at 21, especially after interviewing with Life picture editor Dick Pollard. That
initial contact eventually led to a steady stream of news and feature
assignments (plus several covers) for the iconic magazine. When Life folded in 1972, Peterson reinvented
himself as a successful advertising photographer specializing in
journalistic-oriented imagery for a wide range of top agencies and companies.
Along the way he added television commercial directing to his resume. Peterson
is still working, albeit at a slightly slower pace these days as editorial and
advertising needs have changed.

Bob Peterson

What
inspired you to switch from sports photography to photojournalism?

Shooting sports was fun, but I came to
realize that it was not important or significant in the overall scheme of
things. So I started hanging around Life
and trying to get assignments from them. I had done a few things for Life here in Seattle before I moved to New
York, little freelance jobs. I was very lucky because I was able to get in on
the last six years of Life. I was
eventually put on contract, but I was a freelancer at first, wandering the halls
and talking to people, getting to know a couple of editors.

What
else appealed to you about photojournalism?

It was real. It was honest. My earliest
hero was Alfred Eisenstadt. I remember when Popular
Photography did an issue celebrating his 25th year as a
photojournalist called “The Eye of Eisenstadt.” I was knocked out by his stuff.
I sent him a letter asking what film he used, what light meter, etc. Two weeks
later this letter comes to my house, and it’s got a Life magazine logo in the upper-left corner. It was a letter from
Eisie. He said he’d been using Super XX, but was using TRI-X now because it was
a little faster, and he used a Weston meter, but he generally didn’t need it. I
had also invited him to our family’s house for dinner if he ever got to San
Francisco. I was 14, 15 then. He wrote that if he ever came to San Francisco, I
would be his guest for dinner. Well,
it never happened. Fast-forward, and I’m standing on the 28th floor
of Life magazine, and here comes
Eisenstadt. I stopped him and said, “Mr. Eisenstadt.” And he said, “Just
Eisie.” And I said, “My name’s Bob Peterson, and years ago I wrote you a
letter.” “Oh, wait a minute. You lived in Berkeley, right? You wanted to know
about my film and my meter.” I was just amazed that he remembered.

F. Lee Bailey, Boston, 1967

By
all accounts he seems to have been a pretty humble guy.

He was out here in Seattle on the last
tour of his shows about 20 years ago, and they had a show and then a question-and-answer
period for a lot of young photographers. They asked him questions like, “What
do you think of hand coloring?” “What? What is this hand coloring?” Or, “What
do you do about burnout?” “What is burnout? I’m just a photographer.” For him,
it was just a job. You took your cameras and you went where somebody told you
to go and took pictures of people and brought them back to the magazine.

What
did it mean to you to be a Life
photographer?

There was this wonderful thing about Life magazine. They didn’t really screw
anybody. I mean, they would go after bad guys and so forth. But if Life wanted to do a story on someone,
nobody turned them down. What was the circulation back then? 12 million? Giant
circulation. And they gave you time, the writer and photographer, to do a good
job. I did a story on F. Lee Bailey, and we went up to where he lived just
outside of Boston. The first day we went out I took just one camera over my
shoulder to let him get used to it. The second day I started shooting more, and
the third day more and more. You had time to work with people and you got to
know them a little bit. It was a wonderful experience. In contrast, I remember
the last assignments I did for People
magazine, where you had a half day with a celebrity, and you’d have to make
them change clothes twice so it looked like you were there for more than just
three hours.

John F. Kennedy campaigning in Seattle, 1960

Walter Gropius, 1968

How
many days would you typically have for a Life
assignment?

Five to a week. It varied. Some days
you’d go out and have one day. There were a lot of one-day things, but
something like the Newark riots in 1967, I got called in the middle of the
night and went over there, and was there for a week.

You
did hard news coverage, but specialized in personality profiles. What personal
characteristics helped you excel in this regard?

My parents raised me to be a confident
person, but not pushy, and I seemed to be able to get along with people. I
would go in and follow [the subject’s] lead and be more of a fly on the wall,
even though I’m a large guy. I was able to kind of let them set the standard of
what they were doing. During the first moon shot, I was assigned to meet with
Pat Collins, Mike Collins’ wife. He was the pilot of the spaceship and stayed
in orbit while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on the moon. I just hung
around and was the guy in the house with Collins’ family.

I did a story on Peter Boyle. Remember a
movie called Joe? He lived about 15
blocks from me in New York, and the writer and I would go hang out with him
every day. Just kind of be friends. Everybody knew what was going on. You’re
Peter Boyle, you’re an actor, you’d love to have a story on you for Life. So everybody is going to cooperate
with you and let you get the best pictures and interview possible. The
wonderful thing about Life is that
the writers were incredibly good. To some of the photographers they took a
little bit of a back seat, but the quality of the work they did, guys like
Barry Farrell, and Paul O’Neill, was outstanding. They were very bright,
interesting folks, so they were nice to be around.

Newark riots, 1967

Your
subjects didn’t primp and preen for the camera, they just let you photograph
them in a very natural and candid fashion.

Well, part of that was because you had
enough time. We did a story on Joyce Hall, the man who started Hallmark Cards.
We went to Kansas City and hung out with him for four days. People were willing
to do that. We did a mafia murder story about a guy named Ernie “the Hawk”
Rupolo, who had been stabbed and tied to cinderblocks and dumped into Jamaica
Bay outside Long Island. The guys that did it hadn’t been careful enough, and
they didn’t completely slice his stomach open. He was underwater and starting to
ferment and his stomach filled up with gas and he floated to the surface. We
were doing a story on the prosecutor in that case, and I think I went to Queens
every day for three months. Just hung around with the prosecutor and the
detectives as they were preparing their case. Three months! That’s a long time.
The story was going to be on the cover, but the week it was scheduled to run
was the week the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia, and knocked us off the cover.

What
was your first cover?

I got my first cover with Norman Mailer
when he was writing Of a Fire on the Moon
(1970).

What
was Mailer like as a subject?

He was just a regular guy. I
photographed him twice. Once for the moon book he wrote, where I only spent a
day with him because the magazine just wanted that one portrait. And then I
went back when he and Jimmy Breslin were running for mayor and vice-mayor of
New York City. Their platform was that NYC should become the 51st
state, and their slogan was “Cut out the bullshit.” Mailer and Breslin would go
out and campaign, and the writer and I would follow them around. Even in New
York back then there would be maybe one TV station picking up on it, and you’d
just hang with them the whole day. It wasn’t a mob scene the way it is today.

Norman Mailer, 1969

August 29, 1969 Life magazine cover

What
do you remember most about him?

I really enjoyed Mailer. You’d go into a
bar with him, and he would talk to anybody. He was a contrarian, and he loved
to argue. He would stand with his arms up and his thumbs by his lapels, almost
like a boxer, and combatively take the other side of an argument. But he was
very cool and down to earth. He had his job and I had my job.

It
seemed like you were able to go deeper into Mailer’s personality than some of
your other subjects, like, say, Clint Eastwood.

Eastwood was making Dirty Harry at the time, and a lot of my
coverage was on the set. And he kind of stayed to himself off the set. There
was one day when we were at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, when I got the
shot that was used on Life’s cover.
His son, who was not in that photo, was sitting next to him. And Eastwood was
very relaxed in that setting. But he was becoming a pretty big star then. He
was busier, more focused on his work. With Mailer, a lot of my time was spent
just hanging around with him, whereas Eastwood was focused on his acting job.
And I had less time with Eastwood.

Clint Eastwood, Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco, 1971

Did
any of your subjects ever discourage you from taking pictures?

No, but I remember when Eastwood invited
me and the writer to a screening of Play
Misty for Me, which he had just directed. It was a private screening at
somebody’s house. That was an evening where I don’t think I even had a camera
with me. It just seemed out of place. There were certain times you didn’t take
pictures of people, just out of respect for their privacy.

What
other rules did you have for yourself?

I felt it was okay to ask somebody to
repeat what they had just done for the camera, but I would never have suggested
they do something of my invention. You let the person do what they actually
were doing, and tried not to influence that. Like that F. Lee Bailey in the
courtroom shot. He was wandering around the room telling my writer and me a
story about the Boston Strangler, and how he defended him. Obviously, he was
giving us a tour, and he took us to the courthouse, and we went in there with
him, and all of a sudden I saw this shaft of light coming through the window,
so I backed up and asked him to walk through it one more time.

Mario Puzo, working on The Godfather screenplay, Paramount Pictures, 1969

What
was Mario Puzo like to photograph?

Puzo was a very gregarious guy, and talked
about himself in the third person. He was writing the screenplay for The Godfather in Hollywood at Paramount
Studios, and I went and hung out with him. He would say, “So, they came to me
and they asked, “Who should we get to write the screenplay of The Godfather?’ And I told them,
‘There’s only one guy that can write the screenplay. And that’s Mario Puzo!’”
He typed the screenplay on the typewriter that’s in the portrait shot of him
with a big cigar. He was pretty relaxed. I remember we went to Vegas on a quick
trip, where I photographed him shooting craps in the casinos. On the plane back
to Los Angeles I said, “Well, how’d you do?” He said, “I did great. I only lost
$7,000.” “What? $7,000!” “Oh, yeah, that’s good for me. Sometimes I really get
hurt there.”

Do
you think you would still enjoy working for Life
if it were still around?

I would like to think so. I enjoyed
doing the kind of advertising stuff I’ve been able to do, but there was
something pure about the Life
magazine coverage. I don’t mean this in a bad way, but it wasn’t like the kind
of stuff Vanity Fair runs.

A lot
of that is basically stunt photography.

Yeah, it is. I know
that Life magazine back then wouldn’t
use that kind of stuff. There was a purity to Life. It was very honest and real. You wouldn’t use some of the
tricks that are used today. And a lot of it was black and white. Color started
coming in, but a lot of the assignments were done in black and white. And of
course they had that great lab that did beautiful fiber-base prints. All full-frame.
Everything was printed with the black edges around the image. You could see the
way things were composed. They would crop to fit layouts and things, but there
was a visual purity that I don’t see today. I feel badly for photographers
today who don’t have that big, splashy vehicle to display their work.

Joan Baez, Newport Folk Festival, 1969

Nelson Rockefeller campaigning in 1968

The
canvas has shrunk a lot.

And Life
was expensive to print. I remember someone telling me they were going to take
an eighth of an inch off the top and side of the magazine. Just trim it so the
magazine was ever so slightly smaller. And they would save millions of dollars
in newsprint. One of the things about that era was that people actually got
news from a weekly magazine. Today, it’s the Internet, television, CNN and
MSNBC, and bloggers and Twitter. There are fewer and fewer places for
photojournalism. We lost a newspaper in Seattle, the Post-Intelligencer. It’s now strictly an online paper. The Seattle Times is the last print
newspaper in town. I don’t know how many staff photographers they have, maybe
15. Some of them took early retirement. There’s just no room in the paper. It’s
the same in advertising. I’m on the advisory board of the Seattle Central
Community College, and they’ve got a world-class commercial photography
program, and every year they have 30 graduates, and I don’t know where these
kids are going to find work.

Do
you feel that the people you photographed back then were less guarded than they
are today?

Oh, yeah. Definitely.
Someone once told me that nobody ever turned down being interviewed by Fortune magazine, because Fortune never screwed anybody over. And
when you worked for Life, doors were
opened because people knew that they would be treated fairly by the writers,
photographers and editors.

Philip Roth, 1968

Gotcha
journalism wasn’t as prevalent then.

Not at all. If you hung around with F.
Lee Bailey 12 hours a day and had a drink with him at night, and he said
something off the record, you honored that. You’re right, there wasn’t that
gotcha factor. And security was less stringent. Some of the pictures I shot of
Nixon and Kennedy arriving in Seattle during the 1960 presidential campaign … I
mean, you’d never get that close to the candidate today. I was stringing for
UPI and working for the University of
Washington Daily. Those were my credentials. And there I was, five feet
away from Kennedy when as he arrived in Seattle. And there was some girl even
closer talking to him as he got off the airplane. Security was much less back
then, but people seemed to trust more back then.

Did
you feel a sense of history taking those pictures, being so close to the
candidates, and later, to some of the era’s cultural heavyweights?

In retrospect, yes. But at the time I
just felt it was my job. I didn’t have a sense of history. I have a good, solid
ego, but I never would say, “Wow, this is Peterson taking a picture of Norman
Mailer that’s going to be remembered forever.” I mean, that kind of thought
never entered my mind. It’s just like when Eisenstadt was asked about burnout.
You know, he just considered himself a photographer.

There certainly were stars hanging
around the halls of Life, like Gjon
Mili, the man who made strobe photography famous. And Ralph Morse, who took all
the famous pictures of astronauts and figured out how to mount cameras on
stuff. But anybody could go up and talk to them. Morse would be in his cubicle
and would share information with anyone who asked him questions. In retrospect,
it was significant time. But at that time I didn’t have a sense of history. I
was just hoping for the next assignment.

Richard Nixon and family celebrate 1968 election victory

Were
you generally happy with the way Life
laid out your pictures?

A couple of times things didn’t run, or
a story got killed, and I was always disappointed with that. This is
interesting because as you get older, you start to wonder what’s going to
happen to all your stuff. I’ve been taking pictures since I was 12, so that’s a
lot of images. I’ve been going through stuff to figure out how to archive it,
and I’m looking at the contact sheets, and I realize that Life had some very good editors. I can see how they did the
editing. And they were right on. They did a good job. Rarely would I find a
frame before or after that they missed. So I was very lucky in that regard. And
they generally used stuff well.

When
Life was cancelled in 1972, you began
a transition to advertising work.

In 1970 we were all told that Life was going to start using fewer
photographers in New York. Because they had all these guys on staff that would
be paid whether they worked or not. And they were going to start giving the
staff guys the good assignments in New York. I was a freelancer, and I could
see the handwriting on the wall. I was having lunch with a Life writer, who said why didn’t I just ask them for a contract. I
didn’t think I was important enough to the magazine, but I went in and talked
to the picture editor and said I was thinking of moving to San Francisco or
Seattle and asked could I get a contract. He said that if I went to Seattle
he’d give me a contract. And he did, and it guaranteed me a thousand dollars a
month. For the first time in my life I had a real job, which gave my wife and I
(who had just had a baby) a stability we’d never had. So for the next two years
with Life I was under contract. In
November 1972 they renewed my contract for 1973. And then the magazine was
killed in December. But they sent a letter saying they were going to honor my
contract for 1973, which I thought was pretty incredible.

Real Change ad

Nike ad

I started doing more stuff for Sports Illustrated, but by then it just
wasn’t very interesting, and Seattle wasn’t a big sports town then. And Time magazine wasn’t much fun to shoot
for, because they ran the pictures tiny and didn’t really care about
photography. I had some friends in the ad business, so I put together a book of
my photojournalism stuff, and went around and tried to sell myself as a
journalistic-oriented advertising photographer. And people liked the realism of
my work, and the fact that I could think on my feet and react. At that time you
had ads that had a photojournalistic quality to them. That kind of evolved, and
then I did some commercial directing until I realized that as a film director I
was much lower on the scale than as a still photographer, so I drifted out of
that.

Then the sort of conceptual lifestyle
advertising thing started, and some young art directors here in Seattle liked
that journalistic approach, and that’s when we did stuff for Sims snowboard,
where we faked the Tiananmen Square thing with snowplows. It had a journalistic
feel to it. But the third snowplow was Photoshopped in, and my photography
changed a little bit. Now I’m doing less and less stuff. I’m not retired, but
the kind of work I did, that lifestyle photography, people aren’t doing it as
much.

Sims Snowboards ad

Anything
else you’d like to say regarding the multiple paths your career has taken?

The thing about Life was that you went out with a writer, and the two of you worked
together but tried to stay out of each other’s way. In advertising, you go out
with a team. You have assistants, lighting people. Photographers used to go out
by themselves, whereas today there’s a whole gaggle of people that go out. On a
recent job I had one guy just downloading stuff into the computer and another
guy working on lighting. It’s a bigger deal; it’s harder in a way. You used to
go out with a camera bag and a few lenses and a pocket full of TRI-X. Nowadays
you go out with a Canon 5D Mark II and a couple heavy zoom lenses, and it’s a
different style. I don’t know if it gets in the way or not — it’s just
different. I’m still doing pictures the way I’ve always done them, although I
suppose I’m a little pushier now in terms of getting people into position. But
if you’re respectful of your subject, they’re going to be respectful back and
try to help you as much as they can.

(All images
copyright Bob Peterson. Visit www.bobpeterson.com
to see more examples of his versatile, award-winning work.)